This is the full lecture, now further
revised, that was given in a short version, under the title 'Is There a
Right to
Terrorism?', at meetings in Leipzig University in October 2003. It has
since been published in the German journal Rechtsphilosophische
Hefte, X, 2004. You
can also read a short version of the lecture in both
English and German.
More
is said in defence of my view that the Palestinians have a moral right
to
their terrorism, which of course is as rightly called their
liberation-struggle or the like. The University of Leipzig, in the
greatest of academic traditions, brought honour on itself by resolutely
choosing to hear an unpopular opinion. It also withstood the
neo-Zionist pressure group that succeeded in getting the
publisher Suhrkamp to withdraw from the market the German translation
of my book After the Terror.
Prof. Georg Meggle, does not agree with
my
view -- see his commentary -- but does more
than merely agree with a principle of free speech.
He
shares in the honour of his university, as does the vice-rector, Prof.
Kruger.
The banning of the book was temporary. Another publisher stepped into
the
breach. A Jewish publisher, I am pleased to say. Mr. Abraham Melzer is
in
that noble tradition of his people of which mention is made below.

1. The Principle of Humanity

There is a morality to which we are all committed, by two things. One
is our own great and fundamental desires in our lives along with our
moral
judgements justifying their being satisfied. The other is our
rationality,
just the fact of all such reasons necessarily being general. We are
committed
to this morality, in short, by our human nature.

What it comes to can be indicated by a fast example. (1) You believe it
is wrong for you to be tortured for a month if the alternative is just
my having to go to work by bus instead of having my own car. (2) Your
reason for what you desire, not to be tortured, commits you to other
propositions about other people with respect to great goods and evils
as against lesser satisfactions and frustrations.

The clearest formulation of this morality may be the Principle of
Humanity.
1 It is that we must take actually rational steps, which is to
say actually
effective and of course unwasteful ones, to get or keep people out of
wretched
and otherwise bad lives. Bad lives can be well defined in terms of the
fundamental
human desires for the great goods. These goods, variously related, have
to
do with decent lengths of life, bodily or material well-being, freedom
and
power, respect and self-respect, relationships, and culture.

Each of us, I say, is committed by his or her own human nature to this
principle or something very like it -- some other morality of concern
for
those in distress. That is not to say that we are always or even often
motivated
or moved by this concern. We are often moved by too much self-concern
or
indeed selfishness. We defend ourselves in this by moralities of
relationship,
or other moralities of special obligation, including Kantian ones.
These,
by way of another fast indication, are moralities that allow one to do
yet
more for one's own child or country, as against others, than is allowed
by
the Principle of Humanity.

All moralities of concern and also all moralities of special
obligation, despite confusion and denial with respect to the latter
ones, are in fact consequentialist moralities. They take actions,
practices and institutions to be be made right by consequences or
effects -- some consequences or other, maybe concealed. There are no
moral reasons, in fact no reasons at all,
no things that give rise to action, that do not have to do with
consequences. Those would be reasons for action not themselves having
to do with desires and their satisfaction or frustration. There are
none of those.2

The Principle of Humanity, as you have heard, is that we must do what
is actually rational, not engage in substitute-behaviour, to get and
keep people out of bad lives. Like other moralities of concern,
it is strikingly different from Utilitarianism. In any situation, the
Principle of Humanity of course asks the following question of fact, of
ordinary truth or falsehood. What action or the like will really be
most effective, and least costly
in terms of distress, in serving the principle's own end? That is
certainly
not the question of whether or not an action maximizes the total of
satisfaction or happiness, perhaps by making good lives still better.

In reality there will hardly ever be a case where there is no answer to
be found to the Principle of Humanity's factual question. It will
hardly ever
be that the opposed courses of action will in fact be rational to
exactly the same extent. That is, to take the simplest case, it will
hardly ever
be true that two courses of action are exactly equally likely, on the
best
information and judgement, to get or keep people out of bad lives, and
also
are equal with respect to effectiveness and cost. So there will almost
always
be an answer to the question of which of two contradictory actions is
right
and which is wrong. It will not be that there is no action that is
right,
no action that is according to the principle.

That is not to say that in almost every case it will be easy or
anything like it to see or discover or judge which course of action
serves the Principle of Humanity best. To think so would be nonsense.
In fact, these factual
questions are the hardest questions in morality. The hardest questions
of
morality, in a sense, are not questions of morality. They do not have
to
do with choosing between moral principles. They do not have to do with
deciding,
say, whether a world of wretchedness but of Kantian good intentions
would
be better than the opposite. The hardest questions have to do with
judging
the probable consequences of actions.

All of this is not an introduction, but a first stage in considering
the question of whether there is ever a moral right to terrorism.3
That question can be answered, as it will be here, in terms of the case
of Palestinian terrorism against neo-Zionist Israel. This particular
terrorism is chosen partly because it is the terrorism in whose history
we ourselves are most implicated. It is also the most favourable case,
the terrorism most likely to have the support of the Principle of
Humanity.

Neo-Zionism is the enlarging of Israel beyond its 1967 borders, with
all that this entails for the Palestinians. It is different from
Zionism, which was and is support for the peaceful establishment in
perpetuity of Israel within those borders. The distinction is
mandatory, and most certainly needs to replace talk of undefined
Zionism and of course undefined anti-Zionism. I was and remain a
Zionist in the defined sense. I am not a neo-Zionist.
In this, of course, I am one with very many Jews.

2. The Question of a Palestinian
Moral Right

You can make all terrorism wrong by definition, monstrous if you wish,
as you can make profiting or praying or anything else wrong by
definition.
It gets you absolutely nowhere in argument. To advance in argument, you
will now have to argue, say, that what the Palestinians are engaging in
really is terrorism as you have defined it. You are in exactly the same
situation as when you define terrorism in some way that does not beg
the
question in advance, and then consider whether some of it is wrong.

This is not worth saying in a university, but we do not live in a
university. We live in a world where the very strongest resource in
thinking and talking against the Palestinians and others is an
absurdity. It is the absurdity, often vicious, certainly vicious when
engaged in by governments, that you can in effect just define your way
into a moral conclusion worth consideration.

Terrorism as effectively and fairly ordinarily defined4 may
also be other things, as in the Palestinian case. It may be
self-defence,
resistance, resistance to ethnic cleansing, the struggle of a people
for
liberation, the struggle of a people for their very existence as a
people
in a homeland. Do you ask what reason there is to speak mainly of
'terrorism'
rather than these other things? One reason is the determination to
engage
in actual moral inquiry, to aspire to what can be called moral
intelligence.
It is the strongest weapon of most of us on the side of humanity. Here
it
issues in the objectivity of keeping the killing and maiming in view,
by
way of the word 'terrorism' itself.

Think now of the killing of an Israeli child by a Palestinian
suicide-bomber. Think too of the killing of a Palestinian child by an
Israeli officer in
a helicopter gunship. He of course says that he would have chosen, if
he
could, to kill only the HAMAS terrorist near the child. The Palestinian
suicide
bomber, of course, says effectively the same sort of thing, presumably
as
truly. She would have chosen to have tried as effectively, if she could
have,
without killing the Israeli child, to save her people.

My book After the Terror is on another whole subject, our rich world's
omissions rather than commissions, notably with respect to Africa. It
is
about, for example, a sample loss of 20 million years of living time in
four African countries. However, it asks in passing about the terrorism
in which we have long been implicated -- terrorism in an historical
situation
that is greatly owed to our positive acts. It answers that the
Palestine
suicide bomber does have a moral right to her act of terrorism, and
that
the Israeli in the helicopter has no moral right to his act of
state-terrorism.
5

Any assertion of a moral right is best understood as being in a way
self-referring. This one comes to this: the Palestinian suicide-bomber
was morally permitted if not obliged to do what she did, and this very
judgement has the support of a fundamental and accepted moral principle.

That answer to the question of terrorism, about killing the Israeli
child, is a terrible and horrible answer. The answer remains this if it
is made
more explicit, and thus has to do with Palestinian terrorism as it is
rather
than any conceivable Palestinian terrorism -- thus ruling out the
killing
of all clear innocents, including all children, when this is not an
unavoidable
side-effect. It will also rule out torturing Israelis to death, killing
hundreds
of thousands by biological or chemical means, and so on.6

But the given answer is the answer I defend. This is one of two aims of
this paper. The second has to do with a consequence or corollary of the
answer. It is about anti-Semitism and some German silence.

Can I prove that the Palestinians have a right to kill? Can I in this
paper give something as near to a proof as is possible in moral
reflection and
philosophy? To suppose so would be silly, if not so silly as the
pretence
of proof on television to the effect that the Israelis are right and
the
Palestinians are wrong because the former are a democracy and the
latter
are terrorists. But let me say some new words in defence of the moral
right.

3. The Ordinariness of the
Terrible and Horrible Answer

The terrible and horrible answer about a Palestinian moral right is in
an important way, maybe the most important way, not unusual at all. The
counterpart answer about neo-Zionist killing is given more or less
daily
by neo-Zionists, sometimes overtly, more often covertly. It is in fact
the
burden of what is always said by every neo-Zionist spokesman, every
supportive
journalist in whatever country. It is given not only when the word
'right'
and the like are used, which sometimes they are. It is also given when
it
is said, to choose one of many examples, that the neo-Zionist side's
killing
is somehow necessary.

This cannot mean that neo-Zionists literally have no choice. It cannot
meant that the age of determinism has arrived in Tel-Aviv, or that
there
is somebody or something that really is compelling or constraining
Sharon
to do things against his will. It is patently obvious that what must be
meant by talk of necessity is that the killing is a moral necessity,
necessary
in a right or justified cause. It is certainly not being agreed that
the
killing is necessary in a crime against humanity, the violation of
another
people and their homeland.

Glance away for a moment to items in an overflowing history of us all.
The terror-bombing of Germany in World War Two, intended exactly as
much
to kill civilians as to defeat Hitler, was justified by we British and
our
leaders. 7 So too with the genocide that went with the
growth
of the United States of America. So too with the murdering of British
captives
by the Jewish terrorists who were serving the justified cause of the
founding
of the state of Israel after the Holocaust.

The general fact of the usualness and pervasiveness of the moral
assertion of terrible and horrible propositions, including the
proposition of neo-Zionists today, is not being remarked on in order to
engage in the weakness of tu
quoque or 'you-too' argument. It is remarked on for another purpose.

Moral argument, moral argument in the real world, very often depends to
an extent on what we take other people to think and feel. We appeal to
their judgements in the way that we have some trust in a sensible jury.
A moral claim of a sort never heard of before has less to be said for
it. It has
its uniqueness to be held against it. A moral claim of a common sort,
in
a kind of accord with our human nature, is different.

The claim of moral justification on behalf of the Palestinians is not
bizarre or extreme, so extraordinary to be presumed mistaken --
whatever such a
presumption is finally worth. The Palestinians and the very many of us
who
support them in their judgements are not monsters. There are too many
monsters
in the present and past of the world, far too many, for any of us to
have
the rarity of a monster.

That is a first point with respect to your attitude to the claim of a
Palestinian moral right. The claim is not outlandish. There is also a
second point.

It is in the interest of those who conduct or run our societies to
condemn or denigrate the moral judgements of others with respect to
killing. This they do by two means. One is the use of authority, and in
particular democratic authority, in asserting their own moral
judgements. This asserting, likely to be overt rather than covert,
faces the objection that it is not democracy that makes policies and
practices right, but the rightness of policies and practices that
recommends democracy -- when they have that rightness. A
decision-method can in fact only be judged by what it produces.8

Those who conduct our societies, secondly, condemn or denigrate the
moral judgements of others on killing by the means of concealing their
own judgements. They are covert about their judgements, and thereby
have the effect of making the judgements of others seem vulnerably
singular. It is in the interest
of those carrying forward a 'war on terrorism', for example, to obscure
their own inevitable claim of a moral right to their killings.

It is in the interest of humanity, and a commitment owed to the
Principle of Humanity, to have truth clear, to have things out in the
open, on both sides. It is in the interest of humanity to doubt and
resist the claim to authority with respect to killing, and to uncover
the pretence of a kind
of amorality or agnosticism, perhaps a bogus necessity.

Are you still tempted to dispute the initial claim that the
neo-Zionists, like a multitude of predecessors, claim a moral right to
their killings,
overtly or covertly? Here are a few further and very different thoughts.

It is sometimes said, indeed it was said by Hegel and Kant, that
Judaism depends on law and revelation, in part religious law.9
Let us suppose so. Is the law moral in character? In that case, it
issues in judgements of exactly moral rights and obligations. Is the
law somehow other than moral? In that case, exactly like the positive
law of a land, it clearly needs the justification of moral principle if
it is to be relied on. Then, with that supplement, it again issues
again in judgements of exactly moral rights and obligations.

A second thought about the commonness of claims of moral right is that
it is allowed on almost all hands that there is a behavioural test of
what
someone believes and wants. In the long run, the test works better than
any other, certainly better than what he or she says. Is there a
behavioural
test of what someone believes to be right? I think there is, despite
obvious
reasons for doubt, partly because to believe something to be right is
surely
to make an all-in or inclusive judgement or a final judgement about
what
is to be done -- such a judgement as is indeed revealed best by
behaviour.

But I need not depend on these more or less philosophical points. There
exists, plainly, the human fact that we generally justify what we do.
Criminals do so, often by saying we are all the same, that we are all
only out for ourselves,
different merely in who gets caught. This human fact is not missing
from
Tel-Aviv.

4. The Truth of the Answer

All of that helps to prepare the way for justifying the claim of
Palestinian moral right, but does not itself do so. On what does the
justification rest? Well, the terrible and horrible claim is owed to
the fact that it can be
judged to be true, in more than one way.

As indicated already, there is almost always a fact of the matter as to
which of two possible courses of action -- the terrorism or withdrawal
from it -- would better serve the Principle of Humanity. It is
possible, I hope and trust, to see or discover or judge the fact. It is
possible to judge with
sad confidence that terrorism or self-defence by the Palestinians is
their
only hope against an enemy of proven rapacity.

Further, there is truth in the Principle of Humanity itself. What this
comes to, as you have heard, is truth to our own natures, our
existence.
Some morality is not just feelings or attitudes, stuff you can be asked
to give up or repress. Some morality is not self-interest, say the
self-interest
of a class or a people.The Principle of Humanity is wholly misleadingly
described as a value-judgement, with the implication that it is merely
another
opinion or attitude among many.

There is another kind of fact, plainer truth, that enters into the
first two. It is historical, about a people and the usurpation of their
freedom and power and hence other great goods. In the last quarter of
the 19th Century, there were about 50 times as many Palestinians as
Jews in Palestine. After World War Two, the United Nations terribly but
rightly resolved to make
a homeland for the Jews out of one part of Palestine, rather than a
part
of Germany. There were in fact equal numbers of Jews and Palestinians
in
that part of Palestine. There were 80 times as many Palestinians as
Jews
in the other part. There is now a Jewish state violating the remaining
homeland
of the remaining Palestinians.

The evil of this is not reduced by selected pieces of recent history,
who did what in which negotiations, who destroyed what negotiations by
violence or provocation. The evil is not touched by the absolute
irrelevance of ancient history. My own claim of the the evil of it,
incidentally, is to my mind
not reduced or qualified by a careless mistake of mine in my book,
noted
by my accuser, the discoverer of my anti-Semitism.10 The
mistake
was about where several hundred thousand Soviet Jews settled -- in
Israel
or in the rest of what was Palestine.

5. Asserting the Answer, and
Moral Philosophy

Do you now say that even if the assertion of the moral right of the
Palestinians to their terrorism is true, there are reasons for not
asserting it? Do you say no one thinks all truths must be uttered? That
we all think that some truths are dangerous?

Certainly it is the case that some of us, despite sympathy for the
Principle of Humanity, even commitment, choose not to give the terrible
and horrible answer. I have in mind not merely politicians, with a
vested interest in
non-violence, but goodly people. But they must acknowledge that they
owe
us some articulated reasoning or anyway reasons for their abstention.
They
cannot depend on a primitive and perhaps evolutionary recoil from
violence.
The category of the primitive and evolutionary has no general
recommendation.
It has murder for private gain in it, and much other savagery.

Are some of the goodly people against all violence? Given the kinds of
bad lives that there are, in addition to lives injured or destroyed by
violence, could this generalization possibly constitute an adequate
reason for their position with respect to Palestine? Are they really
against the violence
that ended Auschwitz and the like? There are few such people. Also, for
a
reason already given, having to do with their own human nature, they
seem
to me almost certainly inconsistent, and so in effect to say nothing.

The large questions we face, of which Africa is a still larger one than
Palestine, need asserted answers of different kinds. They need
historical answers. They also need analytical accounts of the
contemporary world, say as provided by our greatest moral judge, Noam
Chomsky. Maybe the questions need adversarial answers given on the side
of a people, if adversarial answers constrained by something like
truth. Popular answers are needed too, and certainly
decent journalism. There is a division of labour here.

Another one of these kinds of answer is moral and philosophical. It is
philosophical in the sense of giving a kind of greater priority to
logic
-- to clarity, completeness and consistency. It is possible to think
that
this more general thinking, in which you and I are now engaged, is
fundamental.
11 It is at least in short supply with respect to the defence of
neo-Zionism. In fact I know of no articulated moral philosophy in this
cause. To deal with
the claim of a Palestinian moral right, a thing of this kind is needed.
Nothing
else is a proper response, say a response in a university.

In such a conflict as the one in Palestine, there is a primary question
of who and what is right, which question of course is inescapable, and
with which we have been concerned.12 There are also
conventional inclinations about the conflict. In a word, they are
inclinations to go along with what is more official, legitimated, or
recognized. They include the inclination to go along with a democracy,
a state, a power, a superpower.

If we do not stand up openly for the justice of the Palestinian cause,
you give encouragement to the secondary inclinations. In fact it is at
least
dishonourable to allow oneself to be, or to encourage others to be, in
the
grip of the categories of the official and the like. The gas chambers
were
official. Hitler was elected.13

6. Negotiation and Futility

Of the rest of what can be said here on Palestinian terrorism and hence
on the general question of a right to terrorism, let me remark only on
the matters of negotiation and futility.

There are, you can think, two ways for a people to get and keep things,
these being violence and negotiation. It has been said at every stage
of the
conflict in Palestine that the Palestinians must give up violence and
negotiate.
That is typically to forget something. Negotiation is the means for
getting
and keeping things of the party whose position and ultimate power is
stronger.
Violence is the means of the other party, the party with no other
means.
It is in the interest of each party and their supporters to condemn or
resist
the means of the other. It is the responsibility of moral thinking to
try
to see what is right.

There are men and women of my outlook, in effect supporters of the
Principle of Humanity, who say Palestinian terrorism is futile. They
are to be sharply distinguished, of course, from those very different
persons who are motivated or influenced in saying this sort of thing by
a kind of toleration of neo-Zionism. They are to be sharply
distinguished, in particular, from those Americans in government who in
fact have dual or divided loyalties.

It needs to be allowed, again, to other supporters of the Principle of
Humanity, that the factual question of the eventual outcome of
Palestinian
terrorism is the hardest question. But it is possible to hold to the
view,
as I do, that this course of action, and only this course of action,
will
secure the freedom and power of a people in their homeland. It is only
wretched
bantustans, or rather only the promise of them, that can now be cited
by
the advocates of negotiation as having ever been on offer in some sense
by the state of Israel. They were also on offer, no doubt along with
guarantees
by the United States, to the people of South Africa and Nelson
Mandela.

To this can be added something else. Jews in the Warsaw ghetto fought
to the end -- hopelessly, it was said. They bring to mind that there
can be
a realism in what is hopeless. You can fight, not for yourself or your
time, but for those who come after you.14 The Palestinians
can do so.

7. Anti-Semitism, Guilt, Silence

I turn briefly to my second subject. It is partly the charge of
anti-Semitism used against any defenders, excusers or even
understanders of Palestinian terrorism, of course including very many
courageous and indeed heroic Jews. As it is possible to forget, the
charge has been common, a tool.15 There is also the matter
of German guilt and German silence.

At an American philosophical conference, you may offer philosophical
argument of the kind in this paper to the conclusion that Palestinians
have a right to stand against the ethnic cleansing of their homeland.
You may then hear from an Israeli professor16 in his paper
that you bring to his mind the Nazi injunction instruction taken over
from Bismarck: 'Think with your blood'. In Germany, you may advance the
proposition about a moral right in a book, with the result that a
charge of anti-Semitism leads to the book being banned by its
publisher, a publisher unmindful of the past.

It does not need saying in a university, or a factory, that to run
together resistance to neo-Zionism with anti-Semitism is to confuse or
run together (1) a resistance to some Jews and also some non-Jews -- in
no case because they are Jews -- with (2) an attitude to all Jews or
Jews in general. The accuser may speak in a loose way, as indeed he
does if he speaks of 'anti-Semitic anti-Zionism'. This is to run
together resistance to Sharon with sympathy for the gas chambers and
the vomit of neo-Nazism in Germany today. It is
not, as some of my own countrymen may suppose, just to run together
opposition to neo-Zionism with merely a preference about who is to be
let into membership of a local golf club.

To engage in the charge of anti-Semitism against the likes of me17
, to add or imply that my book blames the Jews for starvation in
Africa, or that I said on television that Germany is now managed by
Jews -- let me say first that this is to have no membership in the
strong and continuing tradition of Jewish humanity in morality and
politics, with so many noble men and women in it. It is not to be of
that fine company, praised by me before
I ever heard of my accuser.

To be associated with gas chambers falsely is surely to be given a
certain right of reply. It is to be enabled to say, as I do, that
someone who makes the charge of anti-Semitism against the likes of me
is one of three persons. The first is a dimwit, the second a liar. The
third is someone engaged in self-deception, avoidance of evidence that
is feared or not wanted. It is to be less honourable than to be a liar.
No doubt there are also persons
who mix these three identities. In no case should such a person be a
university professor.

Do you say that this self-defence and counter-attack is not philosophy?
Well, it is relevant to the matter of some moral philosophy getting a
hearing. Certainly the charge of anti-Semitism may be precisely a means
of its not being heard.18

Finally there is the subject of Germany. There have been many small
Fichtes, making smaller addresses to the German nation than that
philosopher did
in his time, perhaps addresses like his in calling for moral
regeneration.
One of my excuses for joining the smaller Fichtes is that Germany has
paid
so much attention to my book, and has not heard much reply from me
until
now.

There is an awful question that comes to mind. It has to do with
Germans and their past, and their now being quiet about the violation
of Palestine by neo-Zionists. Is that like your father having murdered
some woman --
and you, as a result, being quiet about a rape by her son?

No large matter was ever settled or even advanced by asserting or
contemplating an analogy. But there is a place for analogies in moral
argument, and also a use for graphic ones, indeed for shock. Remember
that we commonly make
use of analogies in moral thinking, as much as we do of models in other
reasoning and inquiry, in science above all. It is possible, I take it,
to admit the question to consideration by way of argument involving the
Principle of
Humanity. As you will have gathered, that principle has only as much to
do with conventionality and good manners as is called for by its end,
the
rescuing of people from misery and other distress.

Here I can offer only some remarks pertaining to the question.

The retribution theory of punishment by the state is that a particular
punishment is justified because it is the one deserved for the offence.
This backward-looking theory purports to justify punishment by the past
fact of a crime rather than by any consequence of the punishment. There
have
been many attempts to explain in a satisfactory way the given reason:
that
a particular punishment is deserved for a particular offence.

Much effort has gone into trying to give sense to this reason by talk
of a punishment being equivalent or proportionate to the crime. In my
view,
and the view of some others, all attempts but one have failed. They
have
not made sense at all. Or they have produced circularity -- the
proposition
that punishment is justified because it is justified. Or they have not
resulted in recognizably moral reasons for punishment.

One understanding of the retribution theory of punishment has made it
clear, non-circular and apposite.19 It does so by giving up
the idea of justifying punishment only by a fact in the past. In this
understanding the retributive reason for a punishment is that it will
satisfy a present grievance-desire created by the past crime. Such a
desire is for nothing other
than the distress of someone, distress as an end in itself, and not as
a
means to anything else. The equivalent penalty, on this view, is the
one
that does no more and no less than satisfy the grievance-desire.

This understanding of the retribution theory, if it makes it clear and
so on, also makes it morally indefensible in typical cases. A man
cannot
be kept in prison for life only to satisfy grievance-desires. The
impossibility
of this is now very widely recognized, as good as universally
recognized.
We agree that punisghment must have something else to be said for it if
it
is right.

Consider a related theory that comes to mind. Rather, it is brought to
mind not by all but by much of what seems to be the content, character
and
quality of German feeling about the German past.The retribution theory
of
national guilt is that a particular guilt felt by a people is proper
because
it is the one, let us say, called-for by a past crime. Let us pass by
the
question of whether such guilt can be inherited, and instead note but
one
thing. To try to give sense and strength to the idea of a called-for
guilt
will face at least exactly the same difficulties as the retribution
theory
of punishment does in connection with desert.

The upshot, to my mind, will be the view, whatever is to be said about
it, that there is to be a burden of guilt that exactly satisfies the
grievance-desire caused by the crime.

One question that arises about this, of course, is whether
grievance-satisfaction really does morally justify the burden of guilt.
It could not conceivably justify eternal guilt. Another question,
certainly, is whether an ongoing demand for grievance-satisfaction is
in itself reasonable. Plainly the retribution theory of punishment must
in the end operate with an idea of a reasonable grievance-desire. So
too with a retribution theory of national guilt.

You may agree that reflection along these lines, about both punishment
and national guilt, is likely to lead to something different. It is
likely
to lead to reflection on all the consequences of punishment or guilt,
as
against merely the satisfaction of grievance-desires. Reflection will
lead,
that is, to a theory that looks at punishment and guilt partly, indeed
mainly,
in terms of their prevention of further crimes.

To speak from the perspective of the Principle of Humanity, the
question will be simply this: does punishment or guilt, or a particular
punishment or guilt, serve the end of the principle? I suspect
something like this
is an impulse of many of the German people. As it seems to me, it
should
carry with it an end to silence about a crime in the present, a crime
now
being perpetrated against the Palestinians. At least there should not
exist
a certain guilt about the past: one that issues in this silence, indeed
one that issues in another if lesser guilt, a guilt with respect to the
Palestinians.

There are relatively few Germans now alive who acted in the Holocaust.
I speak to the others. What relationship should guide your actions,
including your silence and your speech? A relationship to those your
father killed? A relationship to your father? To the sons and daughters
of his victims?
Or should your silence and your speech be guided by a relationship to
those
in misery, whoever they are? The answer given by the Principle of
Humanity,
although it recognizes certain natural facts, is at bottom the last one.

More can be said, some of it having to do with the fact that Germans
are now rightly known for their bearing of their Holocaust guilt. They
now have the honour of taking on themselves the guilt of their fathers.
They actually have a kind of moral superiority not shared by all of the
rest of us. The Holocaust was not the first or the last genocide or
politicide. Other perpetrators have not been so ready to accept and to
deal with guilt.

For this reason of a moral superiority, Germans now have a special
obligation to speak against a rape. The libel that this speech is
anti-Semitic is certain to be used against them. As before, a false
imputation will be used for
what is underdescribed as a political end, in fact the end of
dispossessing
another people of their homeland. Despite this, Germans will be heard a
little more than other nations. There is the reason for their being
heard
that is their standing. There is also the reason of their silence until
now. They can do more than the rest of us to awaken America from its
stupid
trance, a stupidity that is a matter of an ignorance and thus a
weakness
in judgement.

That is not all. You can say, as I do, in line with humanity, that
Germans today have a certain obligation to those their fathers killed.
They have
an obligation to those who are gone. They have the obligation, in fact
about the future, to make it less likely that those victims of their
fathers died wholly in vain.

10 December 2003

Notes

1. Like several other things in this paper, the Principle of Humanity
is more fully discussed in three books. (1) After the Terror
(Edinburgh University Press, Columbia University Press) was translated
into German as Nach dem Terror by Suhrkamp Verlag and then
withdrawn from the market. An enlarged paperback edition (Edinburgh
University Press, McGill-Queens University Press) has been translated
again by MelzerVerlag. (2) Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in
Political Philosophy (Pluto Press), a revision of an earlier book,
may eventually be translated into German. (3) On Political Means
and Social Ends (Edinburgh University Press), a collection of
philosophy papers, among other things a context for views on terrorism,
may also appear in German.

2. This line of thought is developed in 'Consequentialism, Moralities
of Concern, and Selfishness', in On Political Means and Social Ends.
Substantially the same paper appears in Philosophy, the journal
of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, in 1996.

3. This paper was first a lecture, given in an abreviated form to the
University of Leipzig under the title 'Is There a Right to Terrorism?',
in October
2003. It is better for comments on it by Georg Meggle, Beatrice Kobow
and
others in several audiences. I thank Ingrid Coggin Honderich for
previous
discussions. On the morning of 6 October 2003, she agreed not with me
but
with The Guardian. That newspaper speaks of the suicide-bombing
in
Haifa on 4 October as 'a horrendous affront to all human decency'. It
is
possible to want to agree with that, indeed somehow actually to agree
with
it. But it is also absolutely necessary to keep in mind what the
newspaper
does not, that there are greater horrendous affronts to human decency.
One
has several million Palestinians as its victims.

4. Terrorism has quite a number of features but fundamentally is a kind
of violence, which latter thing is physical force that injures,
damages, violates
or destroys people or things. Terrorism more particularly is this:
violence
with a political and social end, whether or not intended to put people
in
general in fear, and necessarily raising a question of its moral
justification
because it is violence -- either such violence as is against the law
within
a society or else violence between states or societies, against what
there
is of international law and smaller-scale than war.

5. That it is terrorism arguably follows from its being against what
there is of international law. The conclusion is better based than,
say, the conclusion that there were grounds in international law for
the second war against
Iraq. Indeed, an explicit and decent international law will be the
result
of concentration on such actions as those of neo-Zionist Israel, not
something
arrived at separately and then found to be applicable to those actions.
It
is not now in question whether driving a bulldozer over a peace
activist
in order to proceed to the destroying of houses will be in accord with
an
explicit and decent international law.

6. Prof. Meggle rightly asked for this explicitness in the discussions
at the University of Leipzig. See his 'Kritischer Kommentar zu: Ted
Honderich, "Gibt es ein Recht auf Terrorismmus?"' (at
http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~philos/meggle.htm) and also his 'Terror
& Gegen-Terror, Einleitende Reflexionen', in Meggle (ed.)Terror
& der Krieg Gegen Ihn: Offentliche Reflexionen (Mentis, 2003).
On the difference between clear innocents and others, see 'Later
Thoughts on Terrorism for Humanity', the new last chapter in the
paperback edition of After the Terror and the Melzer Verlag
translation. I did not
retract and have not retracted anything whatever of my original view,
which
was perhaps suggested by an account of the Leipzig meetings in the Frankfurter
Rundschau , 21 October 2003.

8. This is in fact implicit in the most famous of reliances on method,
the contract argument of John Rawls. My view of it is given in 'The
Contract
Argument in a Theory of Justice', in On Political Means and Social
Ends
.

11. Let me here remark on a comment of Jurgen Habermas. In the course
of a letter to the press in which he reports that he recommended my
book to
Suhrkamp for publication, and in which he apologetically confirms that
my
book is not anti-Semitic (Frankfurter Rundschau, 6 August 2003),
he
says of me: 'He does not distinguish his political evaluation of
Palestinian
terrorism from the moral justification of it.' This is puzzling. I take
into account, very certainly, the question of whether Palestinian
terrorism
will work, which of course includes such consideration as of its
effects
on opinions and attitudes of third parties, etc. This, presumably, is a
political
evaluation. So too, presumably, is a judgement of the necessity of
Palestinian
terrorism, the question of whether there are alternatives, no doubt
negotiation.
It is odd, to me, to speak of distinguishing these evaluations from the
moral
evaluation of Palestinian terrorism -- they are part of it. Evidently I
fail
to understand Professor Habermas. He cannot contemplate that political
considerations
-- the necessity of courses of action etc. -- do not enter into moral
judgement on the courses of action.

12. It is not so far as sometimes assumed from argument deriving from
the theory of the just war. For an independent and excellent inquiry,
see Meggle, 'Terror & Gegen-Terror, Einleitende Reflexionen'.

13. There is more on conventionality in the new last chapter of the
paperback edition of After the Terror and the German
translation by Melzer
Verlag.

17. A useful source of evidence is my philosophical autobiography, Philosopher:
A Kind of Life (Routledge, 2001)

18. Some other defences against the charge of anti-Semitism against me,
which is absurd not only to me, appear in 'The Fall and Rise of a Book
in Germany', on the website
http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho

19. It is spelled out in my Punishment: The Supposed Justifications
(Penguin, 1984, etc.), to be published in a revised edition in 2004 by
Pluto Press.